Warehouse chaos costs you time and money. RFID tracking fixes it.
dbnAudile design and deliver audio, lighting and rigging solutions for superclubs, festivals, music venues, corporate events and arts performances across the UK and Europe. Their Manchester warehouse is the operational backbone: equipment moves out to client sites and back constantly, supporting everything from intimate product launches to large festivals. The volume isn’t the problem. The problem is knowing where everything is when you need it.
Luke Dyson @lukedyson www.lukedyson.comWhen Asset Visibility Becomes a Business Problem
When kit came back from events, manually logging each piece took time the team didn’t have. Items sat unprocessed, meaning maintenance scheduling lagged, and available stock wasn’t accurately reflected in their system.
The business impact was tangible. Turnaround times stretched, additional costs were incurred due to courier rebooks; simply put, dbnAudile were running harder than they needed to.
Oliver Bracey, Inventory Manager: “We knew where most of our kit was most of the time. But most isn’t good enough when corporate clients expect perfection. Lost kit was costing us, not just in replacement value, but in staff time and our ability to scale.”
With stress levels rising, they knew a better solution must be out there.
RFID Integration with Rental Management Systems
dbnAudile knew RFID tags could bridge the gap between their system and the real world. But equipment needed to scan reliably no matter how or where it was stored. With online merchants offering a minefield of options, dbnAudile sought out expert advice.
CoreRFID’s Technical Director, Richard Harrison, consulted closely with the dbnAudile team to understand what the reality of life on the road looked like. We’re talking about back‑to‑back events, overnight turnarounds, harsh weather and fast, heavy handling by crews working against the clock. dbnAudile needed tags that could cope with festival mud and venue loading bays, endless truck runs, overnight turnarounds and pressure‑washed flight cases. After extensive scoping, CoreRFID supplied durable RFID tags designed for the wear and tear of frequent handling and transport.
The technical implementation was handled by dbnAudile’s in-house developer, who integrated RFID readers with their existing rental management system. This kept workflows familiar while adding automated tracking at key checkpoints: goods-in, storage locations, dispatch and returns.
No wholesale system replacement. No months of staff retraining. The RFID layer sat on top of their current processes, filling the visibility gaps that manual scanning couldn’t cover.
CoreRFID offered a range of RFID tags to dbnAudile to suit a wide variety of equipmentEquipment Tracking Benefits for AV Hire Companies
“Finding equipment quickly has become a daily win. We know when things leave, we know when they come back, and we’re not second-guessing our inventory.” – Oliver Bracey
Avantages
- Equipment Location: Having tagged over 10,000 items, staff now find equipment in under two minutes using handheld RFID readers. Oliver describes it as “a daily win”.
- Dispatch confidence: Outgoing kit gets verified against transport manifests automatically. The team has caught kit sneaking off to site multiple times, kit that would have gone unrecorded under the old system.
- Returns processing: Returned equipment is scanned and logged on arrival. The system updates immediately. Getting kit back in the door happens “pretty instantaneously” now.
- Operational capacity: With less time spent on manual tracking, and improved turnaround times, the team has bandwidth to prepare more concurrent events.
In the summer of 2025, dbnAudile provided equipment for 19 back-to-back festivals. Thanks to RFID tracking technology, they were able to instantly identify which items went straight to the next event, without the need to return to the warehouse for processing.
RFID provides the real-time asset visibility that lets teams work with certainty instead of hope. You stop relying on memory, manual logs or ingrained knowledge about where kit usually gets stored. The system knows, and it tells you.
For businesses like dbnAudile, faster turnaround means higher event capacity, thanks to improved efficiencies in their warehouse operations.
Is Your AV Hire Business Ready for RFID?
dbnAudile and CoreRFID continue to work together to increase tagging across more equipment categories and potential installation of RFID readers to increase overall warehouse coverage.
But the real question is whether your operation has similar visibility gaps. If manual tracking means your team are working harder than they need to, the ROI case writes itself.
The technology works. The implementation doesn’t require ripping out your current systems. The operational gains show up in ways your clients notice: faster turnaround, fewer errors and the confidence that comes from actually knowing where your assets are.
Ready to see how RFID could work in your operation? Book a consultation with Richard to discuss your specific tracking challenges.